Well, not quite. That phrase, inscribed in the James A. Farley Post Office Building in New York City, often thought to be the postal carriers’ creed, doesn’t include the latest challenge to the public delivery of mail. It isn’t weather-related!

The post office in Morristown, pictured here, is threatened with closure, along with more than 3,700 other post offices nationwide, according to a report that was recently issued by the United States Postal Service. (That list includes these other offices in New Jersey.)

Why? Because, the public is told, the USPS is on track to lose $8 billion this year. Mail volume has dropped by 20 percent over the last four years, and 200,000 postal jobs have been eliminated.

“Each day, six days a week, letter carriers traverse four million miles toting an average of 563 million pieces of mail, reaching the very doorsteps of our individual homes and workplaces in every single community in America. They ride snowmobiles to reach iced-in villages, for example, fly bush planes into outback wilderness areas that have no roads, run Mail Boats out to remote islands in places like Maine and Washington state, and even use mules on an eight-mile trail to bring mail to the 500 members of the Havasupai tribe of Native Americans living on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

“From the gated enclaves and penthouses of the uber-wealthy to the inner-city ghettos and rural colonias of America's poorest families, the US Postal Service literally delivers. All that for 45 cents. And if you've written the wrong address or your recipient can't be found, you'll get your letter or package back for no charge.”

The USPS is an unmatched bargain, Hightower writes, a genuine public good that links all people and communities into one nation.

So, why are we talking about this civic treasure as if it’s a burden the nation can’t afford?

Because “the force” we don’t speak about, the private, corporate sector, would have us look at it just this way. Accordingly, the following:

. “Profitability” looms large as a factor in the argument, but, as Hightower asks, “When has the Pentagon ever made a profit?” Or, the F.B.I., the Centers for Disease Control, FDA, State Department, FEMA, or the Park Service, for starters. Producing a profit is not the purpose of government; its purpose is service.

. Being a burden on taxpayers is next up, even though, since 1971, all of the postal services’ operations—including the remarkable convenience of 32,000 local post offices (more service outlets than Walmart, Starbucks, and McDonald's combined)—in Hightower’s words, “are paid for by peddling stamps and other products,” not by one red cent from the nation’s taxpayers. And, get this, in four years of so-called "losses," the Service actually produced a $700 million operational profit (despite the worst economy since the Great Depression). It definitely is not broke!

But, here’s the thing. In 2006, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act required the postal service to pre-pay the health care benefits of current and future, yes, future employees, those who will retire during the next 75 years. So far, as Hightower knows, no corporation has to do this. There is more: The USPS has to fully fund this burden by 2016. It’s costing $5.5 billion a year, money that could be, well, you know, going into services!

To add insult to injury, a 40-year-old accounting error led the federal Office of Personnel Management to overcharge the USPS by as much as $80 billion for payments into the Civil Service Retirement System, diverting USPS sales dollars into the US treasury. As Hightower bluntly puts it:

“Restore the agency's access to its own postage money, and the impending ‘collapse’ goes away.”

. Shrinking the postal service is the third element in the strategy to crush it. In addition to closing the 3700 post office buildings, the USPS is being asked to shut down about half of the 487 mail processing centers across the country; to eliminate 100,000 postal jobs; to restrict mail delivery to five days a week by eliminating all Saturday postal services; to do away with the agency's 40-year standard of next-day delivery of first-class mail, replacing it with a lesser goal of two days or more. And generate more business? You do that by reducing services?

“Postal privatizers and downsizers have reams of data on the price of everything USPS does--yet they are completely unable to calculate value. They don't give a whit either that their model of ‘service’ would leave out entire groups of people, communities, and businesses, or that they'd be taking away much more than mail from millions of fellow citizens. Despite the…denigration heaped on this public service, ordinary folks still feel personally attached to their post office and mail carriers. Sure, there are complaints and some horror stories, but there are many more (though less reported) stories of extraordinary service and simple human kindness by postal workers, which is why the agency has been named the most trusted in government for six straight years.”

Linda StamatoInscription on the Morristown Post Office

The post office is more than a building--it's a community center and, for many towns, an essential part of the local identity, as well as a tangible link to the rest of the nation. Listen to some of the local voices--hearings on prospective closures were held in Morristown earlier this month--and consider the issues that are important to residents and small business owners.

The United States Post Office can have a future, if we think the right way about it. Hightower says that “the biggest lie of all is that USPS is an antiquated, unnecessary, failing civic institution that simply must give way to electronic technology and corporate efficiency.” This is nothing, he says, but “ideological hogwash.”

Obviously, the Postal Service is no longer the only player, and it must make major adjustments to find a proper fit and create opportunities in marketing and public service, but, this is the time to innovate, to offer new services and products, to expand!

Here are some Hightower high notes:

. Start with three phenomenal assets that USPS has:

(1) the network of 32,000 retail outlets--many of them historic and even works of art--that form the most extensive local presence of any business or government in America, drawing more than seven million people into them each day;

(2) an experienced, smart, skilled, and dedicated workforce of nearly 600,000 middle-class Americans who live in the communities they serve and are brimming with ideas and energy to move the Postal Service forward—“if only those at the top would listen and turn them loose;” and

(3) the general good will of the public, which sees their local post office and its employees as "theirs," providing useful services and standing as one of their core civic institutions (in a 2009 Gallup Poll, 95 percent of Americans said it was personally important to them that the Postal Service be continued).

. Build on those big pluses and do the following:

(a) Go digital: The USPS already has the world's third-largest computer infrastructure, according to a report in The Nation, including 5,000 remote locations with satellite internet service. Expand that into a handy consumer service offering high-speed broadband all across the country. Rather than bemoan the loss of postal business to the internet, become an internet hot spot in town after town for universal email, digital scanning and forwarding of documents, etc.

(b) Expand the store: Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vermont) wants to let post offices sell products and services that they're now barred from offering (“thanks to corporate opposition and congressional meddling”). Sanders suggests allowing sales of cell phones, delivery of wine, selling fishing licenses, notarizing documents, etc. This would be a boon to the people in poor neighborhoods and rural areas who don't have convenient access to such services.

(c) Open seven days: Instead of reducing service, be the only entity that offers reliable delivery service to every community in the country, seven days a week.

(d) Bank here: From 1910, “until bank lobbyists killed it in 1966,” a Postal Banking System operated successfully through local post offices all across the land. It offered simple, low-cost, federally insured savings accounts to millions of "unbanked" Americans who couldn't meet the minimum deposit requirements of commercial bankers or afford their fees. Today, banks are even less interested in servicing the steadily rising number of poor people, leaving them to the un-tender mercies of payday lenders and check-cashing chains. So we could bring this small-deposit banking system back into our easily accessible and familiar neighborhood post offices to serve these people and create loan funds for investments in local communities.

The United States Postal Service is just that--a true public service—one that can be tapped for more, to better serve the democratic ideal of the common good. To Jim Hightower:

“This is not a fight merely to save 32,000 post offices and the middle-class jobs they provide--but to advance the BIG IDEA of America itself, the bold, historic notion that ‘Yes, we can’ create a society in which we're all in it together.”

That's worth fighting for, isn’t it? So, show up at those hearings, add your voices to the debates, and recognize what the postal service is up against, why we should care about it, and why we need it. To Hightower, we do this for the United States Postal Service, yes, and “for ourselves, our values, our country.”